The Perfection Trap
A participant in one of our early SOAR Leadership Programmes gave us a fantastic insight as she contrasted how her sons and daughters are taught in school and how we instil values in our children:
‘We teach our boys to be tough and our girls to be good’
There is an element of perfectionism that’s socialised into girls and women from our earliest ages. This is changing. For example, it’s fantastic to see much more female sport participation – learning resilience, experiencing winning and losing, camaraderie, and teamwork as well as physical fitness.
However, …..
Putting Your Job Before Your Career
This one can be a biggie.
We can be so busy proving our competence that we can become indispensable!
The death knell of our careers?
We need to constantly zoom in and zoom out around our careers.
Zoom in: Are we adding value and optimising our development and our contribution in our current role?
Zoom out: Are we seeing the bigger picture of our career progression and are we taking care of that too?
Failing to Enlist Allies from Day One
Firstly, you can enlist allies at any stage in your career – so many of us did not know about enlisting allies back on 'Day One'!
So, whether 'Day One' or 'Today', how do we go about enlisting allies?
Building rather than leveraging relationships
Here’s the pattern we’re talking about:
We build wonderful, trust-filled relationships.
We nurture and take care of them.
And we never, ever, leverage these relationships – somehow it feels like ‘using’ or ‘taking
Over-valuing Expertise
This one we see all the time – especially when women take up new roles!
Even though expertise is important, we know that there’s extra pressure on women to ‘prove ourselves’ when we take up new roles – especially in new organisations – in fact Catalyst Longitudinal Research has shown that women do better staying with an organisation where they’ve already proven their worth as a lot of moving can mean a lot of proving… we can end up giving as much as a whole year proving ourselves in a new organisation before our expertise is accepted and taken for granted.
All that said, our point here is that, even though women can be somewhat ‘forced’ into putting emphasis on proving their expertise when taking up new roles, we think this is not the best option.
Expecting Others to Spontaneously Notice and Reward Your Contributions
In our experience the root of this factor may lie in our attitude to organisational politics!
There are all sorts of words and expressions we use for those we see constantly telling the key people in our organisations how wonderful they are!
And we’re above that, aren’t we?
Our quality work should be seen, judged on facts, logic, analysis, creativity, innovation - and recognised as such. We shouldn’t have to go around telling people what our successes are. The work should stand in its own right.
Well, perhaps - and perhaps not….
Reluctance to Claim Credit
It’s so easy to say ‘take credit for achievements’ - The question is ‘How?’
And are we not claiming credit already??
We think some of the problem rests with language.
Are we, women especially, socialised to use ‘we’ over’ ‘I’ ?
We often hear ‘There’s no ‘I’ in TEAM’. This is a twee expression that sounds wise but it’s way off the mark – there are as many ‘I’s in a team as there are team members!
Being Able to Ask Good Questions is Essential to Leading Effectively
In our work with leaders, we often share an image of a dense jungle with two speech bubbles rising up from it. One speech bubble says 'Hold on folks, we are in the wrong jungle!' and the other says 'Shut up! We are making progress!' How many times has this happened to us where we go full throttle after a solution, only to discover that we had not defined the problem, or asked the right question in the first place! Wise, carefully thought-out questions are worth their weight in gold.
Leaders, Will What Got You Here Get You There?
In the fast-paced world of business and leadership, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that our past successes will continue to propel us forward. But what if we told you that what got you here won’t necessarily get you there? We find that many of our clients come to us when they hit the realisation that what they’re doing is no longer working for them.
We often assume that our past achievements are a reliable predictor of future success. After all, if we’ve climbed the corporate ladder or achieved a certain level of recognition, shouldn’t that trajectory continue indefinitely?
You Can’t Change the Past, but You can Feedforward to a Better Future
In the ever-evolving landscape of leadership and personal development, the concept of feedforward has emerged as a refreshing alternative to traditional feedback. Coined by renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, feedforward focuses on the promise of the future rather than dwelling on past mistakes. Let’s explore this powerful approach and understand how it can transform our interactions and outcomes.